The silver-haired man lashed out, sending a neat stack of typewritten pages flying across his rosewood desk. Kiko Asahi stood unflinching as paper rained all around her. Her master didn’t like it when she moved without permission.
“Why didn’t you kill that intruder?!” Yamato roared, grabbing the back of her neck roughly and forcing her to face the camera footage. “He froze. You had every chance to shoot him. Why did you freeze as well?!”
“I knew him,” the woman replied simply. Her master let her go abruptly, his eyes widening in shock at the video.
“What the fuck?” the man snarled, jabbing at the screen. “Were you… Were you talking to him? What’s wrong with you? He intruded on your living quarters. You should be trying to kill him, not flirt with him!”
“But… I knew him.”
Kiko’s surroundings blurred as her childhood memories surfaced. The fluttering in her stomach whenever she was with Hiro, the horror she felt when she lost control of her quirk and killed her family, the apprehension in her bones when Yamato met her for the first time at Tartarus, the unease across her whole body when he recruited her to be his bodyguard—
Pain stung her cheek, and she found herself in her master’s private office again.
“What is this? Are you malfunctioning?” Yamato snapped his fingers in front of her face impatiently. “Look, I’m telling you this for the last time. You don’t know anyone except your targets and your master. You don’t think; you don’t talk. I think. You kill. It’s a simple fucking rule! You got that in your stupid brain now?”
“Yes, master,” Kusanagi answered robotically.
The man heaved for a few more seconds, before sitting back down calmly. He pulled open a drawer.
“Luckily for you, the intruder was careless.” Yamato showed her a thumb drive. “He left this behind in your room in his haste. And thanks to that mistake, I found out who the real culprit is behind all of this.”
Questions burst out in Kiko’s mind, though she kept herself from speaking her mind. Hiro wasn’t working alone? Who else was involved in this? Why was he targeting the Yakuza?
“Kusanagi, I want you to keep this name in mind: Miles Cooper,” her master commanded. “He’s a target, and a high-profile one, too. It shouldn’t be hard to find him. If he interferes in my business again, hunt him down and kill him. Got it?”
“How about Takehiro Kazuma?” she blurted out before she could stop herself. Kiko’s heart raced, bracing herself for Yamato to lash out again.
Thankfully, he was too preoccupied with his own mumbling to bother.
“I’ve seen the way he carries himself. He’s full of spirit. Well trained, even. But he’s rash, naive, and lacks self-esteem. A boy pretending to be a man.” Yamato’s hands were clasped behind his back as he faced the map on the wall. “The best part is that he’s blissfully unaware of his flaws. Takehiro Kazuma’s just a quirkless chump clothed in tech that he doesn’t deserve. It should be a cinch to get rid of this vigilante.”
Kiko swallowed silently. She didn’t relish the idea of being on opposite sides against her childhood friend, but he had it coming for making enemies with her master. She could only pray that Hiro could hold out long enough for her to execute her own plan in secret.
Her research on quirk amplification has been extremely productive. Many of Yamato’s bases used to be Kai Chisaki’s former research facilities, which made the information-gathering all the more convenient. Collating all the research data took a few days, but Kiko already had an inkling of what to do.
It wasn’t entirely an original idea, considering she borrowed it from an old book she used to read. Basically, she was going for a quirk destruction wave that was going to sweep the whole world and rid everyone of quirks instantly.
With the right setup, she should be able to extract certain characteristics of her own quirk and use them to destroy quirk cells permanently. The only thing she still lacked was a powerful enough device to spread the area of effect to the whole Earth.
And once the playing field was levelled, Hiro would finally stand a fair chance against his opponents. This was the only way Kiko could rescue her friend without directly disobeying her master.
Kusanagi turned on her heel swiftly after Yamato sent her back to her quarters with a careless wave of his hand. He was obviously unaware of what she had been doing in her own time.
Kiko prayed that it would stay that way.
~ ~ ~
It felt like he had only been asleep for five minutes when Hiro was rudely awakened by an incessant rapping on his door.
He groaned, wrenched his eyelids open, took a look at the afternoon sun flooding his room, and shut them again. Whoever was at the other end of the door would have to come back another day. Miles really wasn’t kidding about the physical toll Bjarkan Mode could take on the human body. Hiro’s body felt heavier than a sack of potatoes.
The man was halfway back to sleep before the knocking resumed, louder this time.
With a final groan, he forced himself out of the bed and trudged towards the door. With any luck, it was probably just one of those door-to-door surveyors, and he could go right back to sleep. Hiro rubbed his eyes sleepily and pulled open the door.
“Hello there. May I come in, Takehiro Kazuma? Or do you prefer ‘Zero Hero’?”
Exhaustion fled from his body as adrenaline flooded in. Hiro tensed his body as he took a small step back.
“Yamato—”
A blue forcefield slammed into his body, sending him crashing back into his apartment. Hiro gritted his teeth as he rolled to his feet. His door slammed shut.
“That’s Senator Gouma to you.” Yamato Gouma stepped into his house languidly, his eyes burning a fierce blue.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Hiro stretched out an open palm, mentally screaming for his suit to come to him. Sure enough, a familiar buzzing sound greeted him as his nano-matter suit flew to him from the corner of his room like a cloud of insects. He scrambled towards it, desperate to put it on—
Only for a blue wave of energy to crash into them.
The suit spilt onto the ground like an overturned bucket of sand, seeming deactivated by that energy. Hiro cursed silently and prepared to charge towards the unwelcome visitor, but found his entire body encased in the same blue energy as well. The bindings didn’t even give him the luxury of struggling in vain.
“What… do you… want…?” Hiro managed to squeeze out the words through his tightly bound mouth.
Yamato Gouma’s eyes burned brighter as the energy field lifted Hiro into the air and carried him forward slowly.
“How about a nice little chat?” The man’s smile did not reach his eyes. “Just a talk between two civilised men.”
Hiro’s body was set back down on a stool as the blue bindings around his body vaporised. Yamato pulled out the only other stool under Hiro’s tiny dining table and sat across from him. He fixated a piercing glare at Hiro, seeming to study him intently.
“Civilised guests don’t normally attack their hosts,” Hiro snapped as his eyes shifted to the side slightly.
The deactivated suit was in his field of vision, but it was pointless to even think of summoning it to his body. Even if it was still active, Yamato had already proven himself too quick for Hiro to do anything. Best to play along with whatever that man was scheming for now.
“Civilised men don’t normally sneak around, engaging in industrial sabotage,” Yamato replied in a disturbingly light tone. “And yet here we are. You know who I am, and I know what you did. Let’s drop the formalities.”
“I know what you’ve been doing too.”
The man chuckled, slapping his knee as though he had just heard some hilarious joke. “You do? Of course, you think you do. Because if you really did, you wouldn’t have killed twenty-two men for nothing.”
Hiro’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re fighting for the wrong cause, vigilante. Have you ever taken a good look at what Miles Cooper is asking you to do for him? Or are you that desperate to go on a violent spree? Look, I know you’re not a mere tool. It’s about time you see that for yourself.”
“Stop spouting bullshit and speak plainly.”
“Actions speak louder than words. You left this behind, by the way.” Yamato slid a thumb drive across the table, gesturing for Hiro to plug it into the dusty computer. “Miles is an old partner of mine; I know his powers well enough. He’s a world-class technopath. If he wanted to, he could shut down half our TV stations from the comfort of his home. Do you think he really needed a thumb drive for mere cyber espionage?”
Hiro faltered, but he plugged the device into his machine anyway. The monitor lit up after a few minutes of whirring. A few seconds later, it detected the external drive connected to its system.
And then disaster struck.
Shock crossed Hiro’s face as the files on his computer disappeared one by one, accompanied by the shutdown of multiple programs at the same time. The only saving grace was that Hiro never really used the computer anyway, so he didn’t have much to lose.
“This… thing is a modified Trojan Horse,” Yamato explained after the monitor faded to black. “Instead of taking control of your files, it deletes everything permanently and even wipes them from the hard disk. Nothing can be recovered. Miles Cooper was using it to delete evidence against himself.”
Hiro’s mind spun. He clearly saw Miles moving files on his first mission, although everything was moving too quickly for him to discern anything. Besides, if Miles really required the thumb drive to steal data, how did he get all those documents into his personal server when Hiro had left it behind in the first place?
Dammit, Yamato had a point. Had Miles Cooper really been playing him all this time?
“Do you think I’m stupid? He’s not that kind of person,” Hiro retorted, desperate to convince himself otherwise. “You’re just accusing him baselessly.”
“Miles didn’t get to the top by being honest. He’s a businessman through and through. Even his secrets have secrets.” Yamato pulled out a few documents. “But you have a right to know, so I’ll share them.”
Hiro narrowed his eyes in recognition. The documents looked almost like the ones Miles had shown him the previous night. Except…
“Miles and I used to be partners. Back in our reckless youth, we made many mistakes. Regrettable ones too. We had dreams for the world, just… in different directions. I take it you have heard of Kusanagi, yes? Miles signed a contract with the Villain Factory group to break her out.”
Yamato pointed at an easily recognisable signature. “And if that’s not enough for you, here’s a camera footage of him at the scene.”
He plugged another thumb drive into Hiro’s computer. A familiar-looking video popped up. It was the same video Miles had shown him the previous night, except that it was captured at a different angle. This time, it revealed Miles standing beside Yamato at the entrance of Tartarus.
“No… That’s impossible.” Hiro shook his head hesitantly. “You’re lying. This… This can’t be true!”
“Hard evidence doesn’t lie; only men do. My old friend always had an obsession with quirk modification; claimed it to be the future of our world. He even bought Kai Chisaki’s Quirk Destroyer from the black market to study it. But even that wasn’t enough to fuel his research, so he broke Kiko Asahi out to study her. I cautioned him against it, but he didn’t listen. Miles was always the smarter one; I couldn’t do anything.”
Yamato hung his head.
“But the last straw came when he discarded Asahi after she turned out to be useless to him. I couldn’t bear to see a girl left alone for the second time, so I took her in and trained her to protect herself. Unfortunately, she still lashes out with violence from time to time. Sometimes, she even hurts innocent heroes. Her trauma must’ve messed up her brain or something.”
“W— Why should I believe a word out of you?” Hiro argued. “You’re the head of the Yakuza, and now you want to be the Prime Minister too! If you really are a good guy, you should step down.”
“I never claimed to be a good person; I have made far too many mistakes in my youth to convince even myself otherwise,” Yamato replied in a sombre tone. “But you, of all people, should understand that the past doesn’t define what we can be. Joining the Yakuza was a mistake, but I’m trying to atone for it by getting to the top and keeping them under control. And only by becoming Prime Minister can I properly eradicate them in one fell swoop. Don’t you see? I’ve been playing the long game here. I can save the whole country by myself without wasting taxpayer money. This is My Hero Academia!”
“I…” Hiro’s voice trailed away. The revelation was still sending shockwaves in his mind for him to come up with a reply.
The stool creaked against the wooden floor.
“I’m sorry I attacked you earlier. I guess I lost my temper at the sight of my men’s killer.” Yamato turned to leave. “But you are a lot calmer and reasonable than I had initially presumed. It would be a waste to see you manipulated by someone who just wants to cover up his crimes. Do what you think is best with these.”
He tossed the documents on the table. Hiro kept his jaw clenched, although he had already relaxed his body.
“Y’know, it’s never too late to be a hero.” Yamato gave him a warm, professional smile. “Should I get elected, I promise I’ll change the hero entrance exams to give people like you a fighting chance.”
The door closed gently, leaving Hiro to mull over his next move.239Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ04tDG1tdJw
and then Add to home screen.